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Matti Braun’s one-person exhibition at Arnolfini presents a selection of key works by the Cologne-based artist from the last fifteen years along with new works. Braun is interested in the transit of cultural forms and crafts between different traditions. His paintings, sculptures and installations reflect the way in which meaning changes in shifting contexts. His work is often based on concrete histories and stories of specific people and ideas, but abstracts away from these into his own formal and conceptual explorations. Following his research interests, Braun develops an eclectic and elaborate mesh of concepts that challenge conventional interpretations of Modernity.

The central work in the exhibition is “R.T/S.R./V.S.”, a project about an unrealised film by the renowned Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray entitled The Alien. While Ray’s film was eventually abandoned after negotiations with Hollywood producers, rumours say that the script became later the basis for Spielberg’s classic E.T. Braun recreated the opening scene of the film as a spatial environment – a dark and shimmering lake in the exhibition space, which can be crossed over via logs, cut from a Douglas fir at Westonbirt Arboretum.